1 in the Shadow of Trump: How the 2016 Presidential Contest Affected
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In the Shadow of Trump: How the 2016 Presidential Contest Affected House and Senate Primaries Prepared for the 2017 State of the Parties Conference, Akron, Ohio Robert G. Boatright, Clark University [email protected] The presidential race did not quite monopolize all of the uncivil or bizarre moments of the summer of 2016. One of the more interesting exchanges took place in Arizona in August of 2016, during the weeks before the state’s Senate primary election. Senator John McCain, always a somewhat unpredictable politician, has had difficulties in his last two primaries. Perhaps because he was perceived as having strayed too far toward the political center, or perhaps simply because his presidential bid had created some distance between McCain and Arizonans, he faced a vigorous challenge in 2010 from conservative talk show host and former Congressman J. D. Hayworth. McCain ultimately beat back Hayworth’s challenge, 56 percent to 32 percent, but only after a bitter campaign in which McCain spent a total of over $21 million and abandoned much of his “maverick” positioning and presented himself as a staunch conservative and a fierce opponent of illegal immigration (Steinhauer 2010). His task was made easier by his ability to attack Hayworth’s own checkered career in Congress. In 2016, McCain again faced a competitive primary opponent, physician, Tea Party activist, and two-term State Senator Kelli Ward. Ward, like Hayworth, argued that McCain was not conservative enough for Arizona. Ward was (and is), however, a decade younger than Hayworth, and her shorter tenure in political office made it harder for McCain to attack her. And although Ward had several policy disagreements with McCain, she personalized them to a greater degree than Hayworth had. She discussed McCain’s friendly relationship with Hillary Clinton during the time the two served together in the Senate, and she made little mention of McCain’s ties to Sarah Palin and other anti-establishment Republicans. On July 18, 2016, Donald Trump, in what may well have been an offhand remark to an Iowa crowd, referred to McCain’s reluctance to support him. Trump told the crowd that McCain, who had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam, was not a war hero, because war heroes do not get caught. Although many in the media were aghast at this comment, both Ward and McCain’s Democratic opponent, Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick, marveled at McCain’s lack of a response. McCain’s failure to break with Trump after this, said Kirkpatrick, demonstrated that he was not actually much of a maverick (Meyer 2016). Ward, without directly mentioning the Trump comments, announced within the next week that McCain should not serve out the rest of his term; he should step down “as soon as possible.” Although Trump ultimately endorsed McCain in the primary, Ward seems to have capitalized on the Trump – McCain fight. During the final month of the campaign she sought to frame McCain as a weak candidate – he was too old, she said, and he was unlikely to be a vigorous advocate for Arizona. Ward was the beneficiary of $7.8 million in Super PAC 1 expenditures; among the largest donors to Ward-friendly super PACs was Robert Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire who was the largest donor to pro-Trump groups. The two major super PACs aiding her, her own KelliPAC and the Courageous Conservatives PAC, aired several advertisements describing McCain as being “weak” on immigration and crime. Despite McCain’s mostly pro-gun voting history, he also was the subject of attack ads from Gun Owners of America. Ward probably took the “weakness” argument a bit too far; in an August 25 interview on CNN, she told reporter Chuck Todd that “John McCain has fallen down on the job. He's gotten weak. He's gotten old. I want to give him the best birthday present ever: the gift of retirement.” Ward went on to say that, statistically, McCain was unlikely to serve out his term, and he would not be able to serve effectively. When challenged by Todd on this, she said that “I'm a physician. I see the physiological changes that happen in normal patients again and again and again over the last 20, 25 years, so I do know what happens to the body and the mind at the end of life” (Watkins 2016). As future events would show, Ward may well have had a point about McCain’s health, but the blunt way in which she framed the issue likely harmed her more than it helped. In an election full of overheated rhetoric, Ward was able to draw some attention to herself. Would Ward have run this sort of a campaign had Donald Trump not been in the race? Would she have done better? Worse? We cannot, of course, answer these questions, but it is worth speculating about such things. On the one hand, McCain’s interaction with Trump may well have made him more vulnerable, even if Trump’s comments were unfair. Trump, after all, had exchanges with Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush in the 2016 debates where, despite Trump’s boorish behavior, he seems to have successfully wounded his opponents. Perhaps Trump wounded McCain and Ward was the beneficiary. On the other hand, there are always some political candidates who say bad, or unfair, or ridiculous things about their opponents. Nobody expected Ward to win, and she didn’t. By many measures she was a weaker candidate than Hayworth had been. She may well have run exactly the same campaign regardless of who the Republican presidential nominee was. Maybe she was just a desperate challenger, saying what it took to get attention, or maybe she was tactless and would have been tactless no matter what. Her public statements after the election were consistent with what she had said in the campaign. She announced during the days after Trump’s July 2017 brain cancer diagnosis that the only reasonable approach for Arizona Governor Doug Ducey to take would be to select her for McCain’s Senate seat once he died (Resnik 2017). She also announced her 2018 primary challenge to Arizona’s other Senator, Jeff Flake, using language similar to what she had used against McCain; on August 10, 2017, she told the Daily Caller “I, as well as others, are frustrated with Senator Flake’s weak style. He hasn’t accomplished a thing in D.C., and his values do not align with the people of Arizona” (Goodman 2017). This odd little moment in the Arizona Senate primary illustrates some of the challenges one faces in trying to determine what the 2016 presidential race meant for other candidates on the ballot. The drama of this election was so inescapable during the summer that it is hard to imagine it did not have an effect on other primary elections. Yet determining its effects is 2 difficult. Were some of the candidates acting Trump-like because Trump had given them the idea, or is this just who they were? In this paper, I explore some of the ways that particular types of candidates might have been advantaged or disadvantaged by the presidential race. There are some slight effects. But the largest effect was a negative one – there is some evidence that the 2016 congressional primaries were largely ignored because of the presidential race. This is important because congressional primaries in 2010 through 2014 were not ignored, and the turmoil of these years’ primaries has had major effects on the Republican Party in particular. The decline in the salience of primaries may have consequences going forward. Measuring Primaries and Primary Effects In order to understand the effects of the Trump campaign on the 2016 primaries, a few details on what is “typical” in House and Senate primaries are in order, as are some details on the timing of House and Senate primaries. To make a long story short, primaries usually are quiet affairs. Downballot primaries traditionally exhibit low turnout; since 2002, turnout in congressional primaries has average approximately twenty percent of the electorate. Few of those who do vote tend to know very much about House and Senate primary candidates at all (Boatright 2014, ch. 3; Gerber, Huber, Biggers, and Hendry 2016). Since 1994, there has only been one election cycle (2010) in which more than ten percent of incumbents faced a primary opponent who held them to less than 75 percent of the vote. In a typical election, there are no more than three or four incumbents who lose their primaries, and when incumbents do lose, it is generally because of a scandal or some other highly publicized bit of malpractice. A select number of open seat primaries exhibit higher turnout; challenger primaries (that is, those which select a candidate who will take on the incumbent in the general election) tend to have even lower turnout and lower levels of competition, in large part because gerrymandering has reduced general election competitiveness, and few general election challengers have a chance of winning. In recent years, there has certainly been more attention paid by the national political media to primaries. This is in part due to aggressive efforts by interest groups to back ideological or anti-establishment candidates in the primaries. As I have documented (Boatright 2013a), this sort of strategy has created the perception that moderates of both parties risk “getting primaried” if they engage in bipartisan policymaking or adopt positions at odds with the preferences of the party base. The establishment of super PACs has, as exemplified by the Kelli Ward challenge described above, enabled idiosyncratic wealthy donors to almost singlehandedly put candidates whom they dislike on the defensive.